People from all 50 states and 18 countries are digging into their digital wallets to help North State residents affected by the Carr Fire.

On GoFundMe, the for-profit crowdfunding site based out of Redwood City, those who want to donate will find hundreds of stories from which to choose. As of Wednesday morning, GoFundMe had approved 576 Carr Fire-related accounts.

Those accounts were opened by both private individuals and organizations, said Katherine Cichy, spokesperson for GoFundMe.

“We’ve seen over a million dollars raised” for all Carr Fire-associated accounts, Cichy said. “Donations come from Canada, UK, Denmark, Australia….”

While not all the Carr Fire accounts were opened in Shasta County, the majority were started in California and along the West Coast.

“We’ve seen employers that campaigned for their employees, campaigns for firefighters who lost their homes, things like that," Cichy said.

One account getting a lot of attention is the Tri Counties Bank Carr Fire Fund 2018. Opened Friday, the fund’s goal is to raise $200,000. As of Wednesday morning, the total was more than $146,000.

The Chico-based bank kickstarted the fund with $25,000, said Michael Murphy, the bank’s marketing director.

“We’ve don’t this in the past,” he said. “Our local people are very generous” as are others around the world.

Murphy thinks an important move on GoFundMe's part might have helped this fund take off quickly.

“We were featured on the GoFundMe homepage,” Murphy said. “That's something I’ve not seen" with our GoFundMe funds before.

GoFundMe guarantees money raised gets to the people it's supposed to help, Cichy said. The company verifies funds. People who apply need to provide detailed information about where funds go and how they’re spent.

Another hurdle: Before money is transferred, the account's information, including the applicant's banking information, needs to be verified by GoFundMe's payment processor. When approved, the accounts show up on the site's platform at gofundme.com.

Cichy said no fraudulent accounts have yet been found to her knowledge, and her company “hasn’t seen any misuse related to this event.”

GoFundMe started seeing a lot of Carr Fire-related activity — accounts opened and donations made — starting last Friday, Cichy said. That’s “right around the time when the news broke and people were impacted by the fire.”